Fidrych would lift his wild golden curls
and talk to the sky. Hrabosky the same,
and he’d talk to the ball, circling
the mound, face twitching. And then he would
face the centerfield fence, whirl back
around, go into his stretch, and
pitch.
It’s best not to take chances. You
get your mind stalking and empty.
You slap your glove on your thigh, pace
your pattern. You make a ring of not-caring
around the thing. Too much pressure on one
point and the energy’s down a black hole.
Carlton, on the watch for UFOs, what he might
have been doing is picking up an
archipelago as it moved through its
calculations. His mind was just breathing
in and out.
So much that’s far-fetched
lodges between the in and the out.
Did I mention Luis Tiant, flinging his
head to the sky as his arm came down?
Proof that the center of the world is in
the body, not the sight. You get these actions
together that don’t care about each other.
They don’t stand for anything.
Listen, ball.
Bless you, ball. You and I, ball.
You get into a rhythm. Inside the rhythm
is a pitch. You keep your mind on the
rhythm, waiting to feel the pitch coming on.
You don’t know how to speak directly to
the thing you want more than anything.